50 free Submarine trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Submarines are the stealthiest machines ever built, and their story runs from a hand-cranked wooden acorn in the American Revolution to nuclear boats that stay under for six months. This quiz covers the whole span. Fifty questions take in Cornelis Drebbel's oar-powered submersible, Bushnell's Turtle, the Confederate Hunley, John Philip Holland and the US Navy's first sub, the U-boat campaigns of both world wars, USS Nautilus under the North Pole, the giant Typhoon class, the bathyscaphe Trieste at the bottom of the Challenger Deep, and the losses of Thresher, Kursk and Titan. There is a technical strand too: ballast tanks, the sail versus the conning tower, why boats are called boats, the snorkel, Gertrude the underwater telephone and how a crew makes oxygen. And a pop-culture strand for people who know Das Boot, The Hunt for Red October, Captain Nemo and the Beatles better than any navy. Easy questions ask what a periscope is for; the hard ones want the first steam-powered military sub and the year women first served on Norwegian boats. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on submarines and the individual boats, films and books, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01By naval tradition, what are submarines called regardless of their size?
Boats
US submarines still carry the 'USS' prefix, and in the Royal Navy HMS can mean His Majesty's Submarine.
Q 02Which Dutchman built the first submersible for which reliable construction records exist, in 1620?
Cornelis Drebbel
He was in the service of James I of England, and his craft was propelled by oars.
Q 03What was the name of the first military submersible, a one-man hand-powered craft built in 1775?
Turtle
David Bushnell's acorn-shaped device was the first submarine to use screws for propulsion.
Q 04Robert Fulton's 1800 human-powered submarine shared its name with which later famous vessels?
Nautilus
France gave up on the experiment in 1804, and the British also passed on Fulton's design.
Q 05The oldest surviving submarine in the world, Brandtaucher, was built in 1850 in which country?
Germany
It was designed by Wilhelm Bauer.
Q 06Which submarine became the first to sink an enemy ship, during the American Civil War in 1864?
H. L. Hunley
It sank the Union sloop USS Housatonic with a powder keg on a spar, then sank itself.
Q 07The first submarine not to rely on human power, the French Plongeur of 1863, was propelled by what?
Compressed air
Jules Verne saw a model of the Plongeur at the 1867 Exposition Universelle and was inspired to write about the Nautilus.
Q 08Who designed Ictíneo II, the first combustion-powered submarine, launched in Barcelona in 1864?
Narcís Monturiol
It burned a chemical mix that generated heat for a steam engine while also giving off oxygen for the crew.
Q 09Which British engineer designed the first practical self-propelled torpedo, in 1866?
Robert Whitehead
His invention turned the submarine from a novelty into a weapon of war.
Q 10The US Navy's first commissioned submarine, bought in 1900, was named after which Irish inventor?
John Philip Holland
Holland VI ran on an internal combustion engine on the surface and batteries underwater.
Q 11The Nordenfelt I steam submarine of 1885 came from a Swedish industrialist's partnership with what kind of Englishman?
A clergyman
George Garrett's earlier boat, the Resurgam of 1879, had been lost at sea.
Q 12Where was the world's first 'operational submarine fleet' assembled, in early 1905?
Vladivostok
Russia sent seven boats there during the Russo-Japanese War after the blockade of Port Arthur.
Q 13The U-boat sinking of which liner is often cited among the reasons the US entered World War I?
RMS Lusitania
Germany began the war with only about twenty submarines available for combat.
Q 21Which submarine was the first to surface through the ice at the North Pole, in March 1959?
USS Skate
Nautilus had passed beneath the Pole the previous August using inertial navigation.
Q 22Which class of Russian submarine is the largest ever built?
Typhoon
With a submerged displacement of 48,000 tonnes, they can stay under for six months and even fictionally starred in The Hunt for Red October.
Q 23The CIA used which Howard Hughes-designed ship to secretly raise part of Soviet submarine K-129?
Glomar Explorer
K-129 was lost in 1968; the recovery gave the world the phrase 'Glomar response' for neither confirming nor denying.
Q 14What does the German word 'Unterseeboot', shortened to U-Boot, literally mean?
Undersea boat
Dutch, Swedish and Russian all keep the same 'submarine boat' construction.
Q 15What was the German name for the World War II mass-attack tactic known in English as the 'wolfpack'?
Rudeltaktik
It relied on Enigma-encrypted radio, and stopped working once the U-boat Enigma was cracked.
Q 16Roughly what proportion of the Kriegsmarine's U-boat crews were killed in World War II?
About 70%
Some 28,000 of 41,000 died and 793 U-boats were lost.
Q 17Which navy operated World War II submarines that could carry multiple aircraft?
Japan
The I-400 class were aircraft carriers in miniature; Japan also fielded the Kaiten crewed torpedo.
Q 18US submarines, 2 percent of the WWII Navy, destroyed roughly what share of Japan's merchant fleet?
Over 60%
Allied submarines sank more Japanese shipping than all other weapons combined.
Q 19HMS Venturer's 1945 attack on U-864 is the only documented instance of what?
A submarine sinking another while both were submerged
The crew computed a firing solution by hand against a target moving in three dimensions.
Q 20Which was the world's first nuclear-powered submarine?
USS Nautilus
Launched in January 1954 and sponsored by Mamie Eisenhower, she is now a museum ship in Groton, Connecticut.
Q 24What was the test depth of the titanium-hulled Soviet K-278 Komsomolets, the deepest combat sub?
1,000 metres
Titanium is also non-magnetic, but its cost ended titanium sub construction with the Cold War.
Q 25USS Thresher was lost with all 129 aboard in 1963 while doing what?
Deep-diving tests
The disaster led the US Navy to create the SUBSAFE safety programme.
Q 26Which Argentine warship did HMS Conqueror sink in 1982, the first sinking by a nuclear sub?
General Belgrano
The Argentine surface fleet withdrew to port for the rest of the Falklands War.
Q 27The Russian submarine Kursk sank in which sea in August 2000, killing all 118 aboard?
Barents Sea
Investigators blamed a leak of high-test peroxide from a faulty torpedo, which set off a catalytic explosion.
Q 28The submersible Titan imploded in 2023 while descending to view which wreck?
Titanic
All five aboard, including OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, died instantly.
Q 29Which vessel carried Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh to the bottom of the Challenger Deep in 1960?
Trieste
Its instruments read 11,521 metres, later corrected to about 10,916 metres.
Q 30What do submarines fill with water or air to dive and surface?
Ballast tanks
Nathaniel Symons patented the first working version in 1747 using leather bags that filled with water.